I’m really enjoying it and having a lot of fun with it so far. The “tone” aspects are pretty good, too - My Ryder is definitely channelling Sterling Archer now, which is very awesome.
So far, the game is a blast for me. I mean, it seems like even if I should acknowledge all the criticisms are true, it just amounts to complaining about pigeon shit on a Cadillac. Nasty, but it’s still a fucking Cadillac.
Forbes had an article titled “Mass Effect Andromeda really does get better.”
Basically saying as much. Anyone wanna give me, like, 500 bucks? You’ll be my friend forever…
It absolutely does. It’s like two different teams were responsible for the opening chapter and the later content, IMHO.
Well, I guess. It’s the latest version of what I think of as open-world padding for the sake of padding. The main questlines are okay (except for that no saving on main missions bs). Some of the side quests are okay or interesting, but there’s an awful lot of pointless fetch quests. Lots of open space that looks pretty but without much of interest. At least it doesn’t seem to have never-ending radiant quests.
What was the last really tight RPG without this open-world philosophy?
Looks to me like they copied the pattern of Inquisition right down to having dragons, well… architects, which you can take out in protracted battles. I met one on Voeld, and now I’m wondering if there was one I just missed back on Eos.
I’m done with this fucking game and I’m probably done with Bioware.
I have no idea how some of you can actually praise anything about it. It truly boggles the mind.
From the bugs: being stuck under things, over things, around things, quests being bugged, the UI being bugged, the animations being bugged, it’s to the point where I’m waiting for the next place the game is going to blow up on me.
Performance is very uneven, in the first jungle planet I can be hitting 60 one second and then go down to 35 looking at a wall and a fern. And it’s not like it’s warranted. The jungle planet looks like a level out of ME2. In the graphics department too this game is utterly inconsistent, with some levels and characters looking pretty good, even inspired, and some looking amateurish at best, incompetent at worst. None of the levels appear to be using modern techniques for developing convincing and interesting open areas. The effects works is sloppy, with a terrible blur effect over everything and post processing that drifts from where it’s supposed to be as the camera moves. The lighting can be horribly flat, lacking in volumetric effects and with no inkling of global illumination, subtle of otherwise. It’s often badly placed and overblown, so as to make the mediocre or even some of the truly horrible looking models look even worse! The first jungle world, really made me feel like I was playing a mod for ME3.
In fact, the whole game feels like it was built in the old Unreal 3 engine, complete with it’s technical limitations, and then ported to Frostbite at the last minute, with some touching up here and there.
I could possibly overlook the above if the game featured some decent player driven narrative agency, but that’s mostly gone, except for maybe 2 token choices in the entire story. The lack of narrative agency is a huge blow to me, especially coming from not just Bioware games of old, but games like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin and the Witcher 3. It’s what made these types of game stand out from the mediocre AAA action/adventure tropes that we get from big publishers ALL THE TIME.
But, ok, surely this stuff was diminished because the writing and story were elevated to new levels, SURELY. I mean the budget sure as hell didn’t go into the graphics engine, this game often looks and runs worse than the Battlefield games and even Dragon Age Inquisition. So SURELY, the story is something epic and the dialogue is inspired and draws you into the characters! 'cause the budget sure as hell wasn’t spent in level design, or character design, or animations or UI design. It also wasn’t spent in making the story reactive to player choice or even in very good (with maybe one or two exceptions) voice acting talent.
No, the dialogue is sophomoric. From the awkwardness of some of lines, to the weird non-sequiturs and the sometimes just incomprehensible phrasing, to the often stilted delivery by the voice actors (and sometimes it’s clearly not due to lack of effort on their part). No the dialogue and the writing overall is some of the worst I’ve had the displeasure of sitting through in any game in the genre with anything approximating this level of budget and emphasis on story elements.
I can’t stomach another ridiculous, cringe inducing phrase. I won’t endure another line that treats me like a 10 year old in it’s ham-fistedness, or that describes the obvious, or describes nothing of what’s actually happening or what the characters appear to be feeling (if they appear to feeling anything at all!). I refuse to listen to more torturous dialogue from characters that act like hormone crazed, super awkward 13 year olds. That fails to engage me in any intellectual or emotional level. Hell, I spent more time laughing AT the game and it’s characters than giving a damn about any of them. I don’t care about the Kett, I sure hell don’t care about the Angara. I don’t care about this crew or this world. Even when the writing attempts humour, it’s never funny. Not even polite chuckle funny. Aside from the instance when I laughed out loud in utter frustration, I don’t even think I felt even a twinge of myrth during these supposedly funny scenes.
This game is an utter failure from the stand point of being a Mass Effect sequel. A complete disaster. Even if you ignore what it was trying to follow, I’d say it’s a mediocre game at best just standing all on it’s lonesome. Certainly not a game I will have any more time for.
Combat is the only facet that is pretty consistently good. Although it can also be pretty mediocre too, especially when you take the bad crafting system into account (UI and lack of information and boring abilities to boot). I can’t fathom why anyone would suffer through all the mire just to get at the sometimes ok, sometimes dull, very occasionally cool combat.
I’m done with Bioware. Good luck in the future with whatever you call this type of game, but I’m not interested.
I gave up last night after veen the combat started to drag for me and some of the writing when dealing with the ANgara scientist on this ugly jungle planet just finally broke me. I went online and searched for videos showing some of the later stuff, cause I’ve bene told it gets better.
Nah. It really doesn’t. Even up to the end, you are dealing with some stupid characters delivering some of the stupidest dialogue I’ve ever heard, complete with awkward camera angles, animations, and derpy looking faces/expressions.
“The big thing is going to get us!” “My sister might die”!
::Everyone is smiling::
FUCK.
Don’t watch this if you plan on playing this game: lots of spoilers (I warned you), but it highlights some of the (well, a TINY, tiny, little bit of the) bad writing and other issues of the game.
Also, bird shit on a a cadillac my ass.
There’s definitely one on Eos, though you can’t get to it until after the tier 3 radiation has dropped.
And supposedly, you actually can save while on priority missions…
by switching to a non-priority mission in your questlog!
(haven’t tried it, though)
The missions that REALLY strike me as padding are the “scan/destroy an indeterminate number of things somewhere on this planet, without even general locations to go by” - the body recovery on Eos, and the “battle recorder” missions on both Eos and Voeld, for example.
Do you think that all of this is on Bioware? How much of the issues are due to EA? Because let us be honest, EA does have a habit of sucking life out of so many of their developers.
There were warning signs during the development of the game, as important members of the original Bioware/ME team left the project.
Did it really take 200 people 5 years and $40 million to make this as this video of the “best” of Andromeda says? 5 years + $40M = Mass Effect Andromeda - YouTube I can understand EA losing their patience and wanting to cut their losses. Sometimes, just like with the movie Heaven’s Gate, the money people get jerked around by the creative people who use the former’s money. The money people decide they’ve had enough and don’t want to invest more into projects that have been badly managed.
I have found the Architect on Eos. Turns out the problem was that the NPCs I’m supposed to talk to sometimes spawn at the quest marker, and sometimes they don’t.
That has been the biggest gripe for me, except that it’s just not bothering me much: bugged quests. I have been taking it for granted that if something is puzzling me, it’s that the quest is bugged. So I look it up immediately. In one case, you can’t advance the plot on the Asari Ark quest if you took out the Kett standing around the dingus with your sniper rifle, because it doesn’t get marked as interactive unless you approach it in battle. I Googled the issue immediately, instead of continuing on assuming that there was something I had been missing, and it saved me from discovering the quest was unsolvable after hours of work.
I had to redo the invasion of the Kett base on Voeld because the two goals there did not seem to play well together, so I had to resolve them one-at-a-time. Probably this has been infuriating to somebody, and under only slightly different circumstances it would be to me too, if I ended up not being able to solve it without a lot of backtracking. Nor would I be wrong to be wroth at just the fact that I felt the need to resort to Googling quests for bugs. But I’m not. I’m just enjoying the game. We’ll see how long that lasts.
As for the writing, I just don’t see the depth of character as any shallower than Mass Effect 1. The new Krogan has tender relations with friends and family, whereas all previous Krogan companions were just different flavors of testosterone. The new Asari Scientist is a chaos muppet with commitment issues instead of being a shy nerd with motherhood issues who only becomes a sophisticated badass over the course of three games. Cora, the human Asari Huntress prepped for a destiny that got taken away from her, is a miasma of identity issues she’s stiff-upper-lipping her way through. In my mind I kind of see her in Ashley’s slot. Ashley was close to her family, and had a problem with living down her father’s surrender to the Turians, but mostly she’s remembered as a space racist.
Liam is your activist college roomate. He’s got an obsession with films and approaches new worlds and new races with a sense of wonder. Compare that to Kaiden, whose main attribute was that he suffered science fictiony child abuse and he gets headaches for reasons that have turned other people into terrorists. That point gets dropped in later games, mind you.
I could go on, but in general the character dynamics haven’t gotten worse from Mass Effect 1. In some places, characters have gotten more complex. I don’t recall any scintillating dialogue, but after many playthroughs of Mass Effect 1, a lot of that dialogue is pretty boring and sometimes awkward, too. But Andromeda does convey a strong sense of character for many of these NPCs.
The dialogue might not be scintillating but there have been a lot of good one-liners that make up for that in my opinion.
My favorite so far, from Drack (I’m loving Drack): “That may not be the stupidest thing I’ll hear today but it’s a front-runner.”
I agree that I do like the NPCs, they’re equally a match for the originals if not better. I’m finding that I have stronger opinions about them than most of the older characters, many of whom seemed less 3-dimensional.
I’m still wanting a Blasto-inspired companion though. 
$40 million isn’t necessarily a ton, it’s about what they spent on ME3. Also, “Bioware” is not one studio, it’s several, and this one wasn’t made by the A-team (Edmonton studio) or even the B-team (Austin studio), it was made by the C-team studio in Montreal. Which I think explains a lot of the glitches and subpar animations.
As I continue on (having cleared the ice planet Voeld and most of Eos now) the writing is starting to bug me. There’s a lot of issues with pacing, and being able to do stuff in different orders doesn’t always work well (for example, I met my first Architect on Voeld, and all my party members acted like I had seen one already). The open world seems emptier than Inquisition’s in a way, because there’s not as much cool little stuff to find. In Inquisition it felt like every little camp or cave or temple had some sort of lore like a funny letter, interesting items, something. In Andromeda it feels like a lot of it is just clearing out random Kett or Remnant camps that are guarding nothing except a container full of literal vendor trash. Sometimes I’ll come across an outpost that’s completely empty and think “this would’ve been so much better with just one little datapad setting up a mystery…”
So far the best stuff has been whoever did the writing for the crew logs in the ship. That’s not good.
You have to make some sacrifices for a world in which you can take winding paths through the story, but one noticable issue arising from not being able to know ahead of time where in the main plot you stand is that some conversations start to seem to at some point conspicuously lack a reference to an early big reveal about the Kett. That concern is underlying any discussion about the lost arks.
Speaking of which:
The deal with the Kett feels awfully familiar. I’m sure I’ve come across science fiction where some alien race was horrified that they were engaged in war with what was actually another stage of their own development. I’m sure in that case it was natural rather than targeted genetic manipulation, but I don’t recall what that other story was. It’s bugging me.
I’ve given up and turned the difficulty down from normal to casual. The second time I had to keep re-trying a mission over and over because it wouldn’t let me save was enough. (Not saving during “priority missions” is annoying enough, but the lack of saves or fast travel during the secret project side quest on Eos was just infuriating.) I don’t care about trophies, the combat isn’t that engaging, and it’s not really the point of the game.
At Normal level, some combats actually need to be tried more than once, which is right about how I like it. I hate that they won’t let me save just before turning a corner, but generally there’s some recent autosave.
If I’m understanding the mechanics, you don’t get any bonus for being way underweight with your guns, which addresses the absurdity of the system of Mass Effect 3 as referred to by a random NPC in the Citadel DLC, “Who carries more than one gun anymore?” Now suddenly I’m carrying three and I’m still pinned at 100% power recharge speed.
Once or twice, heck, even three or four times is okay if the price isn’t shooting two or three waves of enemies over and over before getting shredded at the same point. I think the combat marker on the other quest I mentioned was bugged. Frankly, there’s too many enemies and the combat is too repetitive to really be fun. So casual from here on out it is. If I want to jump around like crazy while shooting repetitive enemies I can go back to Destiny. Or go back to my PS3 and play one of six available Ratchet and Clank games. Or back to Fallout 4, where at least the VATS takes out some of the annoyances of repetitive combat.
I’ve heard quite a few people praising the combat, which is odd since to me it’s the least engaging part of the game - it’s standard cover-shooter fare and there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not particularly memorable, either.